Comic Cuts - 1 April 2011

As this is April Fool's Day I'm a little loath to say anything of great importance just in case it's taken as a joke. I'll just stick to what I've been up to.

I spent most of the weekend working on Eagles Over the Western Front, sorting out the original artwork scans that I'd done the week before. I've made a first pass of all 89 pages, although there's a certain amount of work still to do on every page as they need to be cleaned, cropped and resized; I also need to replace all the missing title panels and double-check to make sure all the pages are up to scratch. Once that's done, I'll be able to add them to the folder with all the other pages - which include another 50+ pages of original artwork scans that I did a couple of years ago and the other 80 or so pages which were scanned off the page but at very high resolution and carefully cleaned up. Hopefully you won't see a huge difference.

Click here for ordering information

Click here for ordering information

Wednesday I started work on the covers for all three volumes and I'm quietly pleased with the results. Next week I shall be noisily pleased, but at the moment I still have some text to add before I start showing them off. It's a shame that Bill Lacey didn't produce any covers relating to the strip; instead I've picked out some artwork by Graham Coton and Wilf Hardy, which, with a little fiddling around with, has worked out very nicely. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Copies of Mean Streetmaps are now in and the book is now being packaged up and sent out. I'm a little disappointed at the level of pre-orders but it was always going to be a hard one to sell. The Hurricane & Champion is doing about what I expected and should improve once some reviews start appearing, although I've had some very nice comments via e-mail from people who have received copies, one even suggesting I should receive an honorary degree in Panelology Science!

The other good news is that both The Thriller Libraries index and Wells Fargo & Pony Express are in the country and were due to arrive at the Book Palace warehouse yesterday afternoon. And I also noticed that the pocket edition of Sci-Fi Art that I worked on for Ilex Books a couple of years ago (still available!) is also out. Unbelievably I've had four books out this week and five within a fortnight. I'll try to hustle together some information relating to all these as quickly as I can.

Over the weekend I'll have the third and final part of the Mickey Spillane cover gallery and a little something on Ron Embleton. Next week we should have some more Hurricane Annuals - and I'd like to take this opportunity to say a public Thank You to David Taylor and Ivo Milicevic for filling in a few gaps - and some more episodes of 'The Man Who Searched for Fear' if I can get them cleaned up on Sunday.

And finally... today's random scans. I've not had too much time for cleaning up artwork this week but here are a handful of issues of Confessions Library that I managed to squeeze in. You wouldn't want to mess with these ladies!

(* Confessions Library © IPC Media.)